This startup wants to turn the world into a searchable video feed, starting in San Francisco

• Orchestra has installed over 100 street-facing cameras in San Francisco with plans to install 900 more.
• Its AI turns live footage into searchable data for police, insurers, real estate, and AV firms.
• The startup wants to build "AGI for cities" and plans to put cameras across the US and the world.

It sounds like the opening scene of a surveillance thriller: a startup is trying to turn San Francisco into a searchable video feed.

Orchestra, a 10-month-old company, has set up more than 100 street-facing cameras across the city, giving it live coverage of areas including SoMa, the Tenderloin, North Beach and the Marina. It plans to place 900 more cameras across the city's main commercial corridors over the next six months.

The pitch is something like Google Search, but for city streets. "It's a search engine for the physical world," said cofounder and chief operating officer Stephania Stavropoulos.

Orchestra installs free street-facing cameras on private businesses' properties. The cameras stream high-definition video around the clock, and AI converts the footage into structured data, identifying objects, vehicles, and incidents. Cofounder and CEO Drake Burciaga called the footage the "Erewhon of data" because of its premium quality.

The startup plans to sell different kinds of structured data, not raw footage, to a wide range of customers. Police departments could use video as evidence in criminal investigations; insurance providers could use it to help determine fault in car accidents; and autonomous-vehicle companies could use certain data before expanding into a new city, Burciaga said. Other customers, such as real estate firms, might receive analytics reports about foot traffic in a neighborhood, he added.

Orchestra is entering the market as national backlash grows against AI-enabled cameras. 50 cities and counties have cancelled contracts or deactivated cameras from Atlanta-based surveillance-tech company Flock Safety since early last year. Concerns have centered on privacy, data sharing, and videos of hackers showing how they obtained access to live video feeds from Flock cameras.

"We are not providing carte blanche access to our camera network, and no customer is building directly on top of the raw camera feeds," said Stavropoulos.

Orchestra is raising its seed round, and says it is building "AGI for cities." AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is an AI industry term for a system that can match or surpass human intelligence. Orchestra calls the video model it is building "Omniscience," underscoring its ambition to expand the network to every major US city and eventually around the world.

"It's the ability to know everything, past, present, and future," Burciaga said. "We're all Christians, so we are careful, but somebody could refer to this as God-mode."

'The camera people'

I visited Orchestra's headquarters a few weeks ago, a small office on the top floor of a building in downtown San Francisco. Stavropoulos showed me one of her own paintings hanging on the wall, a colorful piece that blended a woman's bust with the shape of a violin. Then we found Burciaga sitting on the balcony in cowboy boots and a denim jacket with an American flag stitched into the sleeve.

Burciaga dropped out of college to build his first startup in 2021, a platform to help drivers and autonomous vehicles find street parking. But as he tried to build a map of real-world activity, he learned there was a larger market opportunity.

"The digital is already indexed," he said. "But in the physical world, it's a blue ocean."

Google Street View has mapped much of the physical world, of course. But Orchestra is setting out to build a private Street View on steroids, with high-definition video of every commercial corridor streaming day and night.

Burciaga has assembled his dream team to build this startup. His first call was to Stavropoulos, a longtime family friend from Chicago who had run a supply-chain business. He convinced her moved to San Francisco and lead operations at Orchestra.

Then he brought in two older cofounders: Bruno Beccaria, a former Citadel legal and compliance executive whom Burciaga met playing soccer, and Michael Coen, an MIT-trained computer scientist. Beccaria serves as chief technical officer, while Coen leads AI.

For all the sci-fi overtones, the founders insist they are not building an Orwellian surveillance system.

They said Orchestra does not place cameras in residential neighborhoods, and that people's faces are blurred into video feeds. Instead of using facial recognition, the system can identify anonymized people by details like clothing and shoes. The company does retain some of the raw footage, but said access is tightly restricted and never sold to customers.

"There's always been this tradeoff between security and privacy," Burciaga said. "But we are able to anonymize the data, so we're at a time when you can get all the good parts of the data without invading people's privacy."

The founders said they have received almost no pushback as they install cameras across the city. Instead, they've started to be known as "the camera people" and get calls multiple times a week from businesses asking for camera installations. One of San Francisco's largest gym chains contacted Orchestra a few weeks ago, and its cameras are now installed across the chain's locations, the startup said. Orchestra declined to name the gym.

Orchestra said it is building safeguards to avoid privacy issues and hacks. Burciaga brought in Beccaria, who has nearly two decades of experience in hedge-fund compliance, to tighten controls around data access. The company said it regularly meets with cybersecurity advisors to strengthen its systems. The founders said they are exploring putting the platform on the blockchain, which would create a tamper-proof log of who accessed footage and when.

'Robocop'

The company's early focus is public safety. Orchestra has built a product called "Robocop," an AI agent designed to investigate incidents before a human is assigned to a case.

Robocop monitors San Francisco's 911 dispatch data through DataSF, the city's data portal where anyone can access city data and real-time feeds. When a high-priority incident appears near Orchestra's camera network, the system can pull relevant footage and package it into an evidence file called "Veritas."

Orchestra does not currently work with the San Francisco Police Department, but said it is going through the required steps to eventually be able to sell its platform to the department.

The founders said they vet every potential customer and press them on how they plan to use the platform. The company did not share a specific framework for evaluating customers, but said it has turned down local governments that approached it.

"We could build the best parking enforcement officer and generate lots of revenue for cities by snitching on people," Burciaga said. "That's a very boring way to live. It's bad revenue."

When I asked whether Orchestra would sell to a government in China, Burciaga pointed to the American flag stitched into his jacket.

"Look at this American flag," he said. "We're America first."

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